They meandered along, talking about flowers, until they returned to the statue of Saint Valentine at the foot of the steps.

“Conversation tires you,” Lady Constance said, smoothing a hand down the saint’s granite robes. “Talk tires me too. Some people have the knack of monitoring a discussion with half an ear, dropping in and out as they would call upon a neighbor of long-standing. I cannot do that.”

“There’s something Lady Constance Wentworth cannot do? I am agog at the very notion.”

“There’s much I cannot do, but I noticed your attention wandering at lunch. I do the same thing. If the conversation is trivial—and other people’s flirtations are always trivial—my imagination instead fixes on some bouquet that died a week ago. I see how the pattern of the plaster molding and the paisley of a lady’s shawl echo each other. I have a reputation for being not very bright as a result.”

“You like that reputation.” Robert set aside the intriguing possibility that his periodic inattention was not always a symptom of illness.

“Boring people are left in peace.”

Lady Constance was not boring, and yet in her company, Robert did feel a certain peace. More than anybody, she knew what his imprisonment had been like. He loathed that she knew, and he was tremendously relieved to have had a witness to his suffering.

Unwitnessed suffering could come to feel like imagined suffering, after all.

“You have divined my plan for assuming the duties of the dukedom,” he said, watching her hand on Saint Valentine’s cold stone robes. “I will be boring. I will look like a duke, talk like a duke, and comport myself like a duke. I will do nothing to draw attention to myself or to my household.”

“You will be a wallflower duke?” She surveyed his garden, awash in color and imported blooms, appointed with trellises and espaliered greenery, not a wallflower to be seen. “Good luck with that. I am happy to aid you.”

“I was hoping you would be, but you must tell me what I can do to aid you in return. Perhaps something to do with the dream of your heart, the one dearer than a year spent painting in Paris?”

She turned her blue-eyed gaze on him. “How do you know I aspire to anything more ambitious than pursuing my art in Paris?”

Because in some way, he knew her. Not from long acquaintance, but from shared experience. “I was hidden away, lest my family be shamed by my condition. For at least a brief time in your youth, you hid yourself away. I was hidden because my father’s dreams for me as his heir turned to dust. What lost dream sent you into service at a private madhouse?”

“We weren’t to speak of that. We agreed.”

No, they hadn’t. They’d danced around an overt pact, and agreed not to acknowledge the past when others were present.